Do 'Green Jobs' Need a Reality Check?
May 19, 2009
Suzanne Heibel--HispanicBusiness.com
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Going green has often been labeled as our future's savior. The hope is that renewable energy will combat the effects of global warming and other fallout from more than a century of industrial pollution. While the movement's aim is to save our environment, many are pinning economic goals on green as well.
Approximately five million green jobs are predicted to result from the renewable energy sector. The Obama administration even pledged during his presidential campaign $150 billion funding over the course of the next 10 years to ensure that green collar jobs are created. But what if all this faith that we are putting in a single industry is misguided?
Renewable energy simultaneously saving the planet from ecological collapse and mending our broken economy seems overly utopian -- and too good to be true. One Spanish study agrees, finding that relying on trendy, green-minded principles will only worsen economies. Another study shows that green jobs will only lead to an increase of employment outsourcing. The battle over the economic viability of being environmentally minded has ensued.
Spain, like many other European countries, including Denmark and Germany, has already embarked on a green crusade to eliminate waste and pollution. Yet Professor Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain contests that green jobs actually shifted employment possibilities backward his country, causing more jobs to be lost after the initial subsidization of the renewable energy sector subsides.
At a conference for the Heritage Foundation on May 4, 2009, Calzada talked about Spain's switch to renewable energy that began more than a decade ago. During his speech, Dr. Calzada explained that Spain injected nearly 30 billion Euros into creating 50,000 green collar jobs. However, only one in 10 turned out to be permanent. The rest were temporary positions that usually went with installing renewable energy systems. The government could not continue pumping such high levels of funding into subsidizing these companies, so it cut national subsidization levels by 30 percent and, in turn, these companies could not financially maintain their business and compensated by firing between 25,000 to 40,000 employees nationwide.
"This money that we have been taking away from division sectors and putting into the renewable sector, if we would have left this money where it was in the rest of the economy, how many jobs would have been created?" asked Calzada during his Heritage talk on May 4. "The study we have done shows that for every job that has been subsidized in the green job field, in the renewable field, 2.2 jobs would have been created in the rest of the economy. We are destroying more jobs than we would have created."
Calzada encouraged the U.S. government to take notice of Spain's unfortunate backlash, which he perceives was brought on by strict government regulation of the energy sector. "For every megawatt that you are producing from renewable energy, you are destroying 5.3 jobs."
Although Calzada's arguments appear convincing, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the professor is a member of the Center for New Europe and the president of Fundacion Juan de Mariana, both Libertarian think tanks -- the former of which has reportedly accepted sizable funding from Exxon Mobile.
Yet Calzada isn't the only concerned about the hype surrounding green collar jobs. Law professor Andrew Morriss of the University of Illinois College of Law authored Seven Myths about Green Jobs along with three other professors from across the U.S. Morriss and the others, who include William T. Bogart of York College of Pennsylvania, Andrew Dorchak of Case Western Reserve University Law Library, and Roger E. Meiners of University of Texas at Arlington seek to dispel popular beliefs surrounding the almost angelic notion that accompany green job creation. Morriss contends that not only is the public unaware of what "green job" implies but that forecasting the propagation of success of green jobs is virtually impossible.
"The count of the number of [green] jobs is greatly inflated. The two cities with the most green jobs today are New York and D.C.," says Morriss--and the jobs in those cities tend to be both costly and on the periphery of green initiatives. He says that the majority of "green jobs" in these areas are lawyers or lobbyists, not, for example, solar panel installers. "Unless people are making things that people want to buy you're not actually improving the economy. If we let the government pick what technologies are going to be favored and which ones are not [well], they have a bad record of doing that."
The Black Book of Outsourcing Green Report [note: pdf file]> is an additional document that questions the validity of green collar jobs. The report uses data compiled from a multitude of companies suggesting that green jobs are being created faster in India than in the United States due to increasing energy costs usually coupled with the switch to renewables mandated by state governments.
"A large number of green jobs are not going to happen in the United States. Property rights to wind in solar are held by Europe in Japan so the jobs in the U.S. would be [limited]," said Morriss, who agrees with the Outsourcing report that the promise of local green jobs is not entirely truthful. "We have some but not enough [than] in other places."
Furthermore, Morriss does not only believe that green jobs sustainability is unrealistic, he believes that the renewable energy sources currently being mandated for use--such as solar and wind--are not viable options. "In the focus on renewables so far, we haven't found renewables that work very well. Many people don't like the idea of power lines and wind farms by their home. We should leave people alone and let them make decisions on their own."
Morriss's suggestion for an employment boosting, clean energy sector? The free hand of the market. "We've been creating jobs that have been environmentally better off. Energy efficiency is growing. All that happened because people responded to higher energy prices. It didn't take government to do this it took people reacting. We've seen a lot of examples of getting entrepreneurial activities getting helpful. The government should offer incentives for which way they want them to go. People respond to incentives. What we want is to people to develop new forms of energy," said Morriss.
But with Morriss's proposal of free market economy there is a catch. He says that the people who aren't going to benefit are those "in small businesses who don't have the lawyers. We are going to transfer the money to big business who can farm the money."
Still, the Obama administration and environmental groups remain faithful that green jobs will have some positive impact on the current economic recession. By 2030, green jobs are predicted to comprise 17 percent of the total U.S. work force, according to MSNBC. And the free hand of the market? Critics point to lack of governmental regulation as what got us into this mess in this financial imbroglio in the first place.
Check back soon for part II on our series on green jobs, in which we further delve into specifics of green industry proponents' points of view.
Source: HispanicBusiness.com (c) 2009. All rights reserved.
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